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Vista Slow To Copy, Delete Files

Bruce Schneier has said that trying to make digital files uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet. With Vista, Microsoft seems to have done a pretty good job of making premium content files not copyable. Now a few readers have tipped us to a new wrinkle: Vista also makes it very, very slow to copy, rename, or delete ordinary files. Here is a Microsoft TechNet thread on the problem. The Reg reports that Microsoft has a hotfix for what sounds like a subset of the more general problem complained about on TechNet; but they will only give it to customers who ask nicely. And a hotfix is fussier to install than a proper patch.

6 of 494 comments (clear)

  1. Why only a Hotfix and no patch? by jkrise · · Score: 5, Funny

    For very very basic functionality?

    What is Vista doing? Factoring large primes in 640KB RAM?

    --
    If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
  2. Obligatory by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Vista fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Vista PC (an Intel Core 2 Duo w/4 gigs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my ancient Mac running OS 9, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Vista PC, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.

    In addition, during this file transfer, Firefox will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even Notepad is straining to keep up as I type this.

    I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Vista PCs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Vista PC that has run faster than its Mac OSX counterpart, despite the Vista PC's same chip architecture. My 286/12 with 2 megs of ram runs faster than this 2.4ghz mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that Vista is a superior operating system.

    Vista lovers, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use Vista over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.

  3. It is feature I invented by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 5, Funny

    Hey, They stole my stuff. My code takes very long time to do trivial tasks. That is my idea. They stole my idea!

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    sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
  4. Re:Vista File I/O Like Swimming in Molasses by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Someone remind me why I need to "upgrade" to an OS where everything is slower and comes with a restriction for pretty much anything. Not to mention it's not really more secure than a fully patched XP anyway. AND it requires me to upgrade my RAM to do less. How's that making any sense?

    Shiny!!

  5. Re:Confirmed! by drooling-dog · · Score: 5, Funny

    Moving/copying a lot of large files is very suspicious behavior. The compliant and well-behaved user who leaves things where they are supposed to be should only rarely have to do that. Perhaps Microsoft is slowing down the process to give you time to reflect on the error of your ways (or maybe to think about switching to a different OS)...

  6. Re:Interesting... by david_g17 · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...Why is Slashdot so slow to highlight glaring defects in Vista?

    Actually, slashdot reported on this months ago; however, since the slashdot server is running on vista, it took this long to get inserted into the database.